Oprah, the permanent campaign, and the myth of the all-powerful president

The Oprah 2020 frenzy reflects two dangerous trends at the heart of American politics today

Oprah Winfrey’s powerful speech at the Golden Globes earlier this month sparked days of unrestrained analysis (“Oprah 2020 gets low ratings from voters,” said Politico), trending hashtags, trivial polls, and nonstop cable chatter. Too little discussion centered on what Oprah actually said, while too much of it consisted of breathless, and ultimately meaningless, speculation of whether she’ll run for president.

Can a successful person not just give an important, inspiring speech without being immediately shortlisted for the presidency?

Oprah, to be clear, is more than qualified to run. As her remarks demonstrated, she has lived the American story and understands far better than the sitting president what the United States can be. But regardless of what she decides, the 2020 frenzy reflects and reinforces two disruptive trends at the heart of American politics today. The first is the speculative groupthink of the endless race for the presidency, in which the national political discourse revolves almost entirely around the next presidential election. (Donald Trump filed for reelection on the day of his inauguration, for example.) The second is the mirage of the all-powerful president. These forces alone didn’t elect Trump, but they did help make his candidacy possible, and they do threaten to make future elections even more destabilizing.

Let’s start with the permanent presidential campaign, characterized — and monetized — by feverish speculation that treats politics as a sport and substance as a secondary concern.

Before Oprah had finished accepting the Cecil B. DeMille award, many of the institutional forces that perpetuate the perma-campaign immediately revved into gear behind a potential Winfrey candidacy. It would’ve taken little time or reflection to realize that the speculation was just that, but when there’s only enough time for reflection or speculation, one speculates — or risks losing a news cycle. If the Golden Globes had been held in Iowa or New Hampshire, Politico’s web servers would have melted.

In some ways, the permanent campaign depends on the same seductive Ponzi scheme of attention as the National Football League. The NFL generated $14 billion in revenue in 2017, mostly from TV deals. The broadcasts that comprise those deals last, on average, a little more than three hours. Yet only 11 minutes of each broadcast feature actual, live football. The league’s business model depends on convincing millions of viewers that what comes next — not what already happened or even what’s happening now — is going to change everything. (Consider the volume of TV ads for next week’s games that air during the current week’s games.)

Much of the American political conversation now rests on the same empty foundation. Hype and speculation about the next election capture a lot of attention and make a lot of money, further incentivizing the hype and speculation. That cycle is only reinforced by the celebritization of the presidency.

In Vox, Constance Grady describes celebrities as “avatars of America’s subconscious” because “they are the people onto whom we project all our deepest fears and fantasies.” One of those fantasies is, of course, that simply electing the right person will solve our country’s — and, by implication, our own — problems. It’s the democratic equivalent of taking a multivitamin instead of eating better and exercising. The relentless nature of the perma-campaign exhausts us, tempts us, and hammers home the belief that the multivitamin will solve it. That doesn’t just make it easier to elect an unqualified and easily distracted reality TV star. It also, much more dangerously, makes it more tempting to elect an aspiring strongman who promises that “I alone can fix it.”

That brings us to the second threat to democracy showcased by the 2020 frenzy: the conviction of the electorate that the person who wins the office can, through sheer force of will and political mastery, “fix it.” No matter what happened last time, this time will be different. Piling a nation’s worth of expectations onto the shoulders of individual presidents, rather than the institution of the presidency, is a recipe for disappointment at best, demagoguery at worst.

Take the fact that we tend to rate the success of our presidents on the strength of the economy. Presidents do have a role to play in managing the federal bureaucracy, advocating for an economic agenda, and making influential appointments. Presidents’ words can and do move markets. But as Neil Irwin wrote last year in The New York Times, the available evidence suggests that presidents have mostly a marginal effect on the economy. The people we put in the Oval Office “have far less control over the economy than you might imagine,” Irwin writes. How we judge their performance is “highly dependent on the dumb luck of where the nation is in the economic cycle.”

Why do we ascribe these vast powers and responsibilities to the person whose office was designed specifically to prevent a single individual from becoming too powerful?

Many of America’s early chapters were shaped by what Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, calls “the obsessive American suspicion of monarchy.” For the Founders, Ellis writes, that obsession “haunted all conversations about the powers of the presidency.” Yet today, for a country sustained by — and rightfully proud of — democratic institutions built on that very suspicion, Americans seem quite determined to project wide-ranging powers on individual presidents.

As historian Ray Raphael told the Washington Post in an interview last February, “if you just took the Founders at the convention, and how they envisioned the presidency, compared to the presidency today, they would be absolutely aghast.” The causes of the executive evolution transcend parties, stretching from congressional dysfunction to wartime demands for presidential authority.

But an increasingly powerful presidency wouldn’t be sustained over time without the ongoing endorsement of the electorate. Through successive Republican and Democratic administrations, Americans have made it clear that we’re comfortable with this transformation of the presidency. Our expectations for what an individual president can and should accomplish have grown in tandem.

Who knows whether a President Winfrey — or any future president — can meet these expectations. But for now, the Oprah 2020 craze has little to do with an actual candidacy and a lot to do with the same flaws in our democratic process that were exploited by the person in the White House today: the permanent presidential campaign, and the fetishization of an omnipotent president. Neither served our democracy well in 2016. Nor will they in 2020.